July 29, 2010

Speak, Memory

Last week's Torah reading contained a couple of verses destined to thrill theologians for generations to come. God's laws, Moses tells the Israelites, are "your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, who shall hear all these statutes, and say . . . , ‘what nation is so great . . . that has statutes and judgments so righteous as all this Torah?'"

Now that's a powerful assertion: the biblical laws are not merely right by God's authority, they're so self-evidently right that the nations of the world will be blown away by their wisdom. Indeed, religious philosophers have repeatedly cited this passage to justify the claim that sincere philosophical exploration will uncover the universal truth of the biblical commandments.

Perhaps the Torah does contain universal wisdom. But in fact that is not the main thrust of either last week's or this week's reading. Both focus on something entirely different: namely, the importance of memory in the formation of human goodness. Immediately after these verses, for example, we read: "Only take heed to yourself . . . lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen." The horrible consequence of such forgetfulness is that the Israelites will come to imitate the idolatrous and corrupt nations they are displacing.

This week's reading presents no fewer than four key reasons to rely not on righteous laws but on a strong memory:

1. Memory helps overcome fear. The Israelites, about to invade the Promised Land, are terrified at the prospect of their first-ever war of conquest. The last time they'd considered it, their loss of will was punished by forty years of wandering. Now God tells them not to be afraid, but to "well remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt." In overcoming fright, no amount of abstract reasoning can uplift the spirit so well as the memory of past success.

2. Memory motivates good behavior. After the horrors of Egypt, and the trials of the desert, Israel accepted the Ten Commandments at Sinai and committed themselves to Moses' moral leadership. "Your fathers went down to Egypt," Moses now reminds them, "with seventy persons; and now the Lord your God has made you as the stars of Heaven for multitude. Therefore you shall love the Lord your God, and keep His charge." The key word is "therefore": the commitment to goodness begins with gratitude and the recollection of salvation.

3. Memory gives humility. "And you shall remember all the way which the Lord your God led you these forty years in the wilderness," we read, "and fed you with manna . . . that He might make you know that . . . by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord does man live." Goodness is not found in the human mind but exists outside us—a fact, it seems, that can't be known by people who, forgetting the humbling experiences of life, come to believe that they themselves are the measure of all things. Especially in times of prosperity, the temptation is to "say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.' But you shall remember the Lord your God."

4. Memory gives love. "Love therefore the stranger," we are told, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." This commandment appears so often in the Torah that one wonders if it, rather than the Ten Commandments, is not the moral core of the entire biblical program. It is grounded in the memory of enslavement—without which, it suggests, love itself is impossible.

The central message, it seems, is that codes of law, no matter how self-evidently true, are useless unless accompanied by a rich battery of memories and experience. And so we learn that "when your son asks you" the meaning of the commandments, the correct reply is neither that God said so, nor that these are the best possible laws, but rather that "we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand." The apparent non-sequitur can be understood only as declaring the priority of memory over simple obedience to authority, including the authority of our own reason, in spreading goodness to others, beginning with our children.

Why so? Part of the answer is surely that reason and logic offer the weakest motivation for being good. Unless you are a Vulcan or a computer, life is a complex jumble of emotions, burdens, and aspirations—products of the very irrational thing that is life itself. As even Kant taught, good rules may come from reason, but the motivation to follow them has to come from somewhere else—somewhere transcending reason.

There is a deeper answer. Without memory, experience, and the wisdom that come from them, we can't begin to know how to be good. True, not everybody has the experience of being a stranger, or of having his property stolen, or of worshiping idols. But that is where tradition, and the relentless telling of stories that dominates the Bible, come in. And both these stories and the laws accompanying them have to be repeated at virtually every moment of our lives: "And you shall lay up these My words in your heart and in your soul, and you shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up."

Is forgetfulness the true root of evil on this earth, and wise and informed memory the true source of good? So it would seem.